NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his "foremost" mission as the head of America's space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.

Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA's orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering," Bolden said in the interview.

The NASA administrator was in the Middle East last month marking the one-year anniversary since Obama delivered an address to Muslim nations in Cairo. Bolden spoke in June at the American University in Cairo -- in his interview with Al Jazeera, he described space travel as an international collaboration of which Muslim nations must be a part.

For all the new media controversy Bolden's outreach remarks have generated -- which, by the way amounts to about 130 items in a Google News search on "Charles Bolden" (in quotes) done at 9:20 a.m. ET -- this later paragraph in Fox's report is in its own way even more offensive:


Apparently, that would be too "unilateral" or something. Maybe one of the early "beyond low-Earth" missions will be to the moon to remove that offensive American flag that Neil Armstrong's crew planted there.

Maybe one of the early "beyond low-Earth" missions will be to the moon to remove that offensive American flag that Neil Armstrong's crew planted there.